November 7th, 2002 issue #0140

In truth, it's not always that easy being green, especially when you're a cash-strapped university dealing with a 50-year old heat plant and you need to generate more steam.
Last March, Charlottesville residents were horrified to learn that UVA's antiquated power plant spews out more than a ton of sulfur dioxide a day and that the university wanted to increase that amount by 112 tons a year.

The more I surveyed my new car, the happier I got. "New car" is one of those phrases that make Americans unreasonably happy to begin with. And this one well, it was a particularly shiny metallic blue.
Better yet, it was the first Honda Civic hybrid electric sold in my state. I'd traded in my old Civic (40 miles to the gallon), and now the little screen behind the steering wheel was telling me that I was getting 50, 51, 52 miles to the gallon.

According to the Piedmont Environmental Council, in Virginia alone there are 33 new or proposed power plants representing 21,721 megawatts of proposed generation, enough to handle over 30 percent of the nation's expected growth in power demand by the year 2004.

"This is real stuff," says 36-year-old Albemarle entrepreneur Sandy Reisky. He talking about wind power, long known for operating without water or pollution, and he says it's now cost-competitive with coal and natural gas. The Department of Energy predicts that within 12 years, five percent of the American electrical market will come from wind turbines.
Reisky's firm, Green Light Energy, wants a piece of that.